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The Many Worlds of American Communism

On this episode of Cosmopod, Donald and Parker welcome Cosmonaut author Josh Morris on to discuss the history and historiography of the US Communist Party. Academic accounts of the party have largely fit in two camps; Josh’s upcoming book The Many Worlds of American Communism attempts to go beyond the standard story and rethink the scholarship for a post-Cold War era. Below we have included a preview of Morris’ book which is based on the preface.

The Communist Party of Philadelphia holds a rally on May Day, 1935, across the street from City Hall.

In 2019, amidst a wet and humid June afternoon, the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) held its 100th anniversary conference. There, members young and old gathered to meet and greet as well as vote in the new generation of Party leaders. The conference numbered over 500 and attracted a large number of youth activists ranging from students to hard working young adults. In recent years, a growing interest in the concepts of Marxism, communism, and anarchism developed around the world as the international economy reached a crisis point during the 2008 recession. After the publication of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century in 2013, which unveiled systemic conditions about income inequality throughout the modern world system, sales of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital soared throughout Britain and the United States. He Nian, a Chinese theatre director, re-created an all-singing, all-dancing musical to commemorate Marx’s work in 2014. English literature professor Terry Eagleton published Why Marx Was Right in 2011 while French Maoist philosopher Alian Badiou published The Communist Hypothesis to rally activists into a new era of communist theory.1  In the 2016 American Presidential Election, the CPUSA ardently advocated for opposition against Donald Trump in a manner that mimicked their historical attitude toward the ‘lesser of two evils thesis,’ earning them both attention and criticism from American activists, leftists, students, and unionists. Finally, in November of 2018, the Historians of American Communism gathered in Williamstown to discuss the 100 years of American communist history and its legacy in the United States.

My research examines the American communist movement from its origins in the spring of 1919 until the transition into what is increasingly being called the New Communist Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. I examine the role of communists in U.S. history by dividing up the narrative into multiple worlds of activity and engagement; particularly political activism, labor organizing, community organizing, and the experiences of anticommunism. I argue that American radicalism in the 20th century took on features that distinguished it from a specific effort, such as civil rights legislation or collective bargaining agreements. Whereas communism as a movement in the United States has been depicted historically as a rather exceptional and unique movement, I understand it as an expression of American radicalism. American Communism has a difficult and sometimes contradictory history; conflated between questions about ideological motivation and the practical gains netted by both American workers and citizens as a result of such motivation. American communist history is not a history of organizations, nor is it a history of how certain ideologies had effects on the actions of individuals. It is a history of people at the grassroots and how they chose to balance their lives within the context of American democracy and through the ideals of Marxian socialism. 

This research asserts that American Communism can be understood in a variety of ways depending upon the context from which the examined organizers and activists engaged with American citizens. As Perry Anderson pointed out, to write a history of a communist party or movement one

“must take seriously a Gramscian maxim; that to write a history of a political party is to write the history of the society of which it is a component from a particular monographic standpoint. In other words, no history of a communist party is finally intelligible unless it is constantly related to the national balance of forces of which the party is only one moment, and which forms the context in which it must operate.”2

People engage in social movements with a passion that expresses the very conditions of societal pressure and a desire to change specific said conditions. When one examines the work of communist political activists, they will find experiences that unveil a deeply ideological political movement. By switching to an examination of communist labor activists, one reveals a much different narrative; focused on legal strategies for obtaining collective bargaining rights, and cared less about the conclusions of a political committee than it did the demands of local workers. Finally, if one examines the work of communist organizing in the communities against institutionalized forms of societal oppression, they will find a more emotional and cultural narrative that sees American radicals trying to balance the ideals of the nation with the ideology of Marxism. 

I refer to the “many worlds” of American Communism as the variances of experience displayed in the historiographical and biographical record in an effort to unpack how American Communism meant different things to different people, and most importantly that these meanings changed with people as the years went by. American Communist history is best understood as one component of a larger history encompassing a variety of radical political, labor, and civil rights movements dating back to the late 19th century; the history of Pan-Socialist Left in the United States. 3 By the 1930s, American Communism was indeed a “world political movement,” but it also existed as a domestic movement with localized influences that varied in experience from person-to-person. As a movement in the United States from the 1920s through the 1950s, American Communism varied from state-to-state, dependent upon geopolitical circumstances, social tensions over issues such as race, the extent of unemployment in dominant industries, and the palatability of industrial unionism within a given workforce.

Since the mid-1990s, scholarship on American Communism has expanded as newer sources became available, the Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Recent History (RTsKhIDMII/RGAJPI) digitized its archives on the CPUSA, and new methods of interpreting history, such as an emphasis on personal experiences—sometimes referred to as social history—became more widely used. James Barrett’s William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism along with Randi Storch’s Red Chicago were among the first works to benefit from newer sources and demonstrated a clear break between the ‘traditional’ and ‘revisionist’ schools of thought, as put by Vernon L. Pedersen in The Communist Party in Maryland, 1919-57. The traditionalist school, best represented by Theodore Draper’s The Roots of American Communism and Harvey Klehr’s The Heyday of American Communism, viewed the ideological link between the CPUSA and the Soviet Union as the most significant aspect of this history, particularly when defining the boundaries of what made a particular strike, event, or organization “communist.”  These historians depicted American Communism as a wholly unique phenomenon; so unique that to be a member of the CPUSA was to already be considered anti-American. Seeking to understand American communism as a domestic ideological movement, the revisionist school countered with an emphasis on the “correction of injustices in American society,” with works such as Mark Naison’s Communists in Harlem during the Depression and Robin Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe:  Black Radicalism and the Communist Party of Alabama.4  

The traditionalist school suffers from a general negative perspective of communist ideology and treats it as a foreign/alien movement that only existed because of the Soviet Union. The revisionists suffer from a nuanced and overly positive perspective and make very little effort to explain why such a history requires a methodology that emphasizes context both internationally and domestically. In turn, criticism of revisionist scholarship on the subject by traditionalist historians, particularly Draper’s essays in the mid-1980s, do not take into account how by 1985 younger history scholars were in the midst of transformative academic overlapping fields of study. Michael Brown identified some of these overlaps which contributed to a shift in how revisionist scholars approached American communist history as: anthropological studies concerned with links between power and social differentiation, a more critical understanding of “resistance” and “identity,” intersectional feminism and its focus on gender and the relationship of social norms to heterogeneity, and new sociological studies on the cultural dialectics of populist activism. Both schools, however, unveil an over-arching handicap that prevents the writers and readers of the subject from fully grasping the complexity of American Communism.

At the root of the traditionalist and revisionist schools of American Communist history is the placement of the CPUSA and its leadership class as the nucleus of the entire history; where the narrative both begins and ends as a political history of dissidents and radicals. This depiction convinces the reader that they are examining a fundamentally un-American concept; a history of radicals in America as opposed to a history of Americans who turned to radicalism. Both schools use the CPUSA as the nexus from which their conclusions are drawn:  The CPUSA’s ideological link and involvement in the Comintern as well as the policies of the Soviet Union served as the foundation for traditionalist claim that American Communism was merely a front for Soviet espionage and subversive activities. The CPUSA’s promotion of African American, labor, and civil rights as a political policy served as a foundation for the revisionists rejecting the significance of traditionalist claims and focusing on the positive contributions of communists toward labor and social history. In both instances, the CPUSA is the beginning and the end of the narrative, while the externals are used as contextual links and exceptions to the rules. A prime example is the preferential use of the term “ex-Communist;” which according to Draper and Klehr does not express someone’s rejection of socialism and Marxist ideology but rather merely their former membership in the CPUSA. Additionally, the individual testimonies of low-ranking communists and communists with shared membership across various organizations are overlooked in most analyses. Rather than see leaders and ex-members of the CPUSA as the cohort of what communists were, the examination of ‘many worlds’ asserts that all participants, from leaders to rank-and-file activists to so-called ‘fellow travelers’, must be understood as involved in the movement to varying degrees in overlapping efforts, even if only some of their efforts are associated with the CPUSA.

Hugo Gellert poster for Daily Worker circa 1935

The traditionalists focus on what I call the political world of American Communism; which indeed developed into a highly centralized political movement by the 1930s, with direct connections to the Soviet Union, centered on the CPUSA; but filtered out into other organizations such as the Communist League of America (CLA), the Workers’ Party of America (WPA), and later the Workers’ Party of the United States (WPUS). Little effort was made to understand the internationalist link; instead preferring to merely depict it as an act of subversion. The revisionists focus generally on one of two different worlds, the labor and community worlds of American Communism and also tend to generalize the distinctions between the two around issues such as racial equality in the workplace and at the community despite the fact that organizing for racial equality in the workplace was fundamentally different from organizing in the community. Randi Storch was among the first scholars to abandon the approach of a single narrative history by examining the social dimension of communist political culture during the Third Period (1928-1934) and utilized a geographical approach of focusing on Chicago. While not ignoring the overt ideological connection with the USSR, Storch demonstrated that amidst the early portion of the Great Depression, American communists both inside and outside the CPUSA “learned how to work with liberals and non-Communists” by developing “successful organizing tactics and fight[ing] for workers’ rights, racial equality, and unemployment relief.”5 Jacob Zumoff expanded on Storch’s approach in his work The Communist International and US Communism, 1919-1929, where he demonstrated that while the traditionalists were indeed correct in the overt connection between the Communist International (Comintern) and the CPUSA, they failed to address the nature of the relationship parties shared at the international level, such as how the Comintern emphasized that the CPUSA “Americanize” itself and act as a more independent political organization and did not ask of them to blindly follow the dictums of another communist party.

The division of American communist history into multiple narratives complicates the historiography and at the same time more accurately portrays the experiences of those who participated in the movement. Storch observed that the historiography had a few particular avenues; one which observes the political dimension of communist activity, one which examines the community-based organizations and localized communist activism for localized projects such as the Unemployment Councils, and one which observes the movement’s interconnection with other scholarship, such as labor and cultural studies.6 The concept of “many worlds” or “rival histories” is a common claim in the field of International Relations where “competition between the realist, liberal, and radical traditions” consistently reassess our understandings of social movements. International Relations scholar Stephen M. Walt argued this concept on a broad level when discussing the nature of international political ideology throughout the mid-to-late Cold War (1960-1991). In a subject where multiple interpretations exist in addition to multiple variances of experiences among sources, “no single approach can capture all the complexity” of a social and political movement. Furthermore, the end of the Soviet Union and the availability of new sources did little to resolve the struggle of competing theoretical interpretations of the history. Instead, it “merely launched a new series of debates” about the extent to which social movements were domestic in nature versus the by-product of international relations. For Walt, this was a matter about “contemporary world politics” using a variety of sources and contextual evidence to develop a well-rounded approach to policymaking.7 

The notion of multiple worlds of a single movement also incorporates observations from world literature scholars about how “writers frame their respective cultures as ‘windows on the world.'” Daniel Simon asks, given the subjective nature of writing about international issues, “how do we read world literature?”8 This same question applies to almost any social/political movement at the domestic level:  How do we read the histories of social/political movements that are invariably linked at the international level to various other cultures, movements, and people? The answer, whether conscious of it or not, is that we read it divided:  When we want to understand American Communism as a political movement, we look to its international roots and its ideological links abroad; when we want to understand American communist activism in labor, we look to its temperament and palatability with specific working groups, such as industrial auto workers and non-white agricultural workers; when we desire to understand anticommunism, we look to the Cold War for contextual explanations for the violation of domestic constitutional rights. The particular ‘world’ focused on―labor, community, political―is invariably written with a subconscious emphasis of the specific circumstances of each case, but rarely do historians take the next step of linking these various worlds as multiple experiences of the same history; as subjective relationships to the same movement. Instead, each approach tends to emphasize itself as the history to be examined; be it the history of American Communism’s ideological roots in Europe, the history of the American labor movement and its tendency to utilize radical and militant communist organizers, or the history of individual American communist’s resistance to racial injustice and social inequality.

The history of American Communism must be understood through a lens that emphasizes the particulars of the society within which the movement existed; American society and the traditions as well as conflicts common to American people—both communist and non-communist. American Communism as a movement possessed a reach that extended into the political, the legal, and the civil corners of the United States during multiple transformative periods of American society. While both the revisionist and traditionalist schools of thought have added important contributions to this history, they have also both suffered from an approach that treats a multi-faceted social movement as a singular, monolithic phenomenon. Despite the depiction of acting as mere conduits between Soviet policy and American communist activism, grassroots rank-and-file communists in the United States channeled increased political energy into specific areas thought to be effective at, or at least open to, organizing for social change and typically sought only tacit approval from their local Party club. For example, by utilizing a geographical approach, Storch was capable of examining outside a framework that centered on the national CPUSA from 1928 to 1935 to demonstrate how “a wide variety of communists coexisted in Chicago,” including high and low ranking Stalinist cohorts and also non-Stalinist activists engaged in social, political, and labor-oriented activities. Additionally, both the break-away CLA and the CPUSA enjoyed the increasing romanticism and popularity of the Bolshevik Revolution among youthful activists, which by 1929 had “sparked the imagination of liberals and radicals throughout the United States.”9

Elements of the pan-Socialist tradition, which in urban areas like Chicago included “socialist, anarchist, and militant trade-union traditions,” rushed to engage with their society under an increased sense of urgency. The CLA and the CPUSA sought to gain momentum by seizing control of the increasing interest in revolutionary theory, Marxism, and the idealism of the Bolshevik Revolution by a newer and younger generation of scholars and activists.10 Under this context, it should be easy to understand that the term “American Communism” does not refer to exclusively one group, one organization, or one political party—as it has been used in the past. The tendency to view the movement as a “monolith,” where the degree to which someone is or is not a communist is measured by the degree to which they are separated or under the thumb of the CPUSA, dominates the existing scholarship on American Communism. It is important, however, to understand the subtle and theoretical differences of this movement if one is to understand the totality of its impact on American history. 

The Communist International, or Comintern, played a role in the development of American Communism but it was not the sole actor as it did not have, and ultimately lacked the means of, direct influence over all communist organizations in the United States throughout the CPUSA’s heyday. Factional disputes and power struggles internally—themselves an inheritance of the first generation of communist party leaders from 1919 – 1921—contributed significantly to the redirection of local American communist politics during the Third Period (1928 – 1934). Although much of this factionalism was not alien to the Soviets and the Comintern, the acute and specific conditions of the factional disputes were linked to disputes about American labor traditions and conflicts with American political organizations, such as the Socialist Party. The CLA continued to operate throughout the Third Period, but its work focused on advancing “Left Opposition” to the CPUSA instead of pushing a general political policy for the United States. The CPUSA, in turn, resisted oppositional groups like the CLA as endemic of what they called “social fascism.”11 This dynamic forced the CPUSA to act politically and organizationally in ways the Comintern could never predict. Following the 1928 presidential campaign and the formal separation of anti-Soviet groups, the political agenda of the CPUSA “had neither a beginning nor an ending point,” as it sought to “register the extent of [the] Party’s support in the working class by mobilizing the maximum number to vote for candidates.”12 Throughout the Third Period, American Communism solidified into a social movement through the emergence of grassroots communist activism and the rise of multiple areas of strategic importance for communist work in the United States, areas that I call the many worlds of American Communism. 

The primary sources chosen for my research are broad, and for good reason:  to understand what American Communism was we must examine not just Party records and the memoirs of Party leaders but also the memories of the lived experiences of the movement across different geographic and socioeconomic backgrounds. The sources break up into two categories. First, there are the Party’s own documents and those archived by the Soviet Union; usually referred to as the Comintern Archives. During the Third Period, the primary means of distributing communist theory in the United States was through a wide variety of Comintern and CPUSA publications, such as The Communist, The Daily Worker, and its regional variants such as The Southern Worker and The Western Worker. For communists outside of the CPUSA, such as those that filled the ranks of the CLA and the SWP, periodicals such as The Militant served as the basis for discussion and followed a format similar to that of CPUSA publications. These publications were unabashedly anti-Soviet in their rhetoric and ultimately central to understanding how communists thought domestically about issues such as unemployment, race, gender, and the day-to-day struggles of working people during the Depression. As such, these resources are the best remaining examples of American communist thought throughout the late 1920s and 1930s and include theories both constrained by and liberated from Soviet oversight, as some of the sources extend from groups disassociated from the USSR. 

Among the most significant and dominant publishers for communist literature for American communists were Progress Publishing, based out of Moscow, and International Publishers, based both in New York and Chicago. International Publishers Company started in 1924 in a joint-venture investment project started by A.A. Heller, a wealthy socialist who had ties to production industries in the Soviet Union. The publishing company struggled for over 15 years. At first, it was held up only by Heller’s overinvestment. It later gained a significant amount of support and cohort of dedicated readers from the Workers’ Party of America. The Workers’ Party of America later became the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) in 1927, but it helped Heller find outlets for the publisher to distribute. To compete with the publication of Marxist and communist works by other publishers, International Publishers focused on books “not yet published in English” but written by prominent socialist thinkers.13 Progress Publishers, based in Moscow, printed the various works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and the Comintern’s theoretical journal, The Communist, in multiple languages for communist parties in Europe and the United States. Since most American communist political philosophy had its origins in the broad theoretical traditions published by both International Publishers and Progress Publishers, they can be seen as the lens through which the political, labor, and community communist activism evolved throughout the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.

The next category of sources are personal memoirs, autobiographies, historical biographies, and oral histories. Part of this analysis accepts that party documents, government reports, and political newspapers present one interpretation of the historical narrative. But it also asserts that in between the depiction of events in official records and the memories of those events by people there exists some semblance of the truth. Autobiographies, like that of Peggy Dennis, provide insight into the way American communists thought about Party leaders and their experiences with Soviet policy decisions in the immediate aftermath of major political shifts. Similarly, autobiographies of grassroots communists, such as musician and chronic traveler Russell Brodine, do not focus exclusively on their identity as communists but rather incorporate their ideological experiences into their broader life experiences. The same case applies to the autobiography of the CPUSA’s oldest living member, Beatrice Lumpkin, who published Joy in the Struggle in 2015. Lumpkin’s work, like Brodine’s, uses her involvement in ideologically-motivated events as tangential and parallel to her overall life experience and thus provides a dynamic look into the life of a communist involved in multiple aspects of political, labor, and civic engagement. Personal memoirs, like George Charney’s A Long Journey, as well as historical biographies such as The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: Life as a Negro Communist in the South by Nell Irving Painter do a similar service of discussing communist activism as part of what these American radicals believed to be a component of their own personal and learned American ideals. Similarly, memoirs that focus exclusively on specific, chronological, and widely-known historical events, such as James Yate’s Mississippi to Madrid: Memoir of a Black American in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, help connect what grassroots communists believed to be patriotism to their ideological investment in socialism and Marxism.

Oral histories are continuing to serve historians as the ideal ways to understand what lived experiences mean to individuals still to this day. One of the most important aspects about oral histories of a movement such as American Communism is how they convey a tremendous gap between the average activist and the ideological world of politics. While possessing the fault of any primary source in terms of questionable validity, oral histories do possess a fundamentally unique trait: they are guaranteed to be real in the mind of the person telling their story. Over the course of eleven years my research has built upon over 10 oral histories of living and deceased American communists. Some of those interviewed remain active members of the CPUSA, others are part of political clubs in different parts of the country, and others prefer to remain anonymous for personal reasons. All of their stories, however, help fill in the gap of meaning for a movement that is told mostly through the lens of ideologically driven reports. In total, the sources used are intended to provide a broad examination of the American communist movement from multiple angles. The sources chosen for this research were picked because of their desire to tell their personal side of the story, and to explain why some individuals dedicated years, often decades, of their lives to a movement regardless of how the majority of the nation viewed them at any given time.

Outside of strictly industrial workspaces, individuals across the nation joined the American Communist movement for a wide range of reasons and from an even wider range of backgrounds. As a Jewish second-generation immigrant from New York City, Lumpkin spent years learning about the plight of workers from her leftist parents and family, as well as fellow community members, as the nation descended into the Depression. William Z. Foster joined after facing difficulty within AFL and syndicalist unions in the post-World War I strike wave. Danny Rubin joined after witnessing anti-Semitism in Philadelphia and linking the treatment of the local Jewish population with the general treatment of the working people in his city. Hosea Hudson joined the CPUSA in the wake of the Scottsboro case and the rising influence of the International Labor Defense (ILD) as an organization to fight discrimination. James Cannon, like many who eventually held leadership in either the CPUSA and/or other organizations such as the CLA, became inspired by the actions and tenacity of Russian Marxists to restore the “unfalsified Marxism in the international labor movement” and the romanticism of the Russian Revolution.14 Len DeCaux joined the CPUSA as a result of his perception of “herd impulses” he felt from teenage conformities while attending the Harrow School during World War I and the subsequent shortcomings of the IWW with regard to a practical plan to organize the masses. Russell Brodine joined after experiencing difficulties at his college’s local organization of fellow musicians in securing spots on the orchestra and defending against a cut of existing pay rates. In short, there never was a single particular reason as to why American communists became American communists—just like any political/social movement, American Communism attracted people by the message it delivered and the hopes it promised. The outlets for these citizens were the organizations previously mentioned and the subsequent labor and community organizations, such as the Unemployment Councils, the CIO, the ILD, and countless civic organizations that emerged out of the struggle. 

While not exceptional by American political standards, the American communist movement was without-a-doubt one of the most diverse of all communist movements worldwide. The political idealists who crafted domestic communist policy in the United States under various organizations, clubs, and union locals faced a constituency with American values and American experiences, regardless of what their ideological schools of thought taught them. Either they, their parents, or their grandparents immigrated from Europe, or were liberated through emancipation subsequent to the American Civil War, to escape political and personal persecution. Many who came to publicly identify as communist during the ‘heyday’ of the movement viewed the tenants of socialism as compatible with or parallel to the virtues of American liberty, while others viewed the American system as a viable Republic merely corrupted by the special interests of an oligarchic elite. In this sense, American communists by the late 1920s were genuinely American first, and communist second. This is not to say that the majority of communists in the United States lacked a fundamental understanding of class analysis and awareness; but rather to suggest that the majority of American communists sought to relate their American experiences to their understandings of Marxism as opposed to use Marxism as a means to alter the social conditions of the United States. Furthermore, the diffusion of communists across various organizations masks the numbers of active communists throughout the Third Period and Popular Front, as noted by more recent scholarship. Many of the organizations and unions commanded by communists were not “numerically dominated” by members of the CPUSA, the CLA, or the SPA. The International Labor Defense (ILD), for example, operated as an independent organization of 2,520 individuals but was led and organized by a small group of 150 CPUSA members, and given a substantial amount of funding to operate in cities like Detroit and Chicago. Auxiliary organizations, which combined political members with union numbers and groups such as the ILD, “suggest a much wider support base than membership numbers allow.”15

Moving forward in the subject of American communist history requires a more radical departure from traditionalist narratives than provided by revisionist scholars. The approach of understanding the complexity of a movement through its “many worlds” of experiences is not merely a new historical account of the CPUSA; it is a history of a social movement of which the CPUSA is a significant part of. A critical analysis of American Communism must focus on the everyday, the grassroots. This approach is an attempt to create what Michael Brown described as necessary for the subject:  a theoretical and methodological defense of what is legitimately unorthodox about traditionalist claims of American Communism. Rather than treat participants of a social movement as mere functionaries or as a component of a heterogeneous mass, this approach places participants at the front and center of the narrative. It also acknowledges the existing schools of scholarship on the subject as the product of an intellectual culture of all fields, not just tendencies in the discipline of history. Acknowledging the “many worlds” of American Communism is not just an acknowledgment of the complexity of the experiences of American communists, it is an acknowledgment of the complexity of all social movements—of which American Communism is one example of. It is only from that point that it becomes possible to expand upon such a method—critique it, develop it, modify it—thereby establishing some semblance of a history that is liberated from the contextual constraints of the high and low Cold War.

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Progress of the Storm: Collaboration with Revolutionary Left Radio

We are very happy to release this crossover episode with Breht O’Shea from Revolutionary Left Radio and Red Menace! Remi (@cosmoproletan), Parker (@centristmarxist), and Donald (@donaldp1917) have a wide-ranging discussion with Breht touching on current events, ecological Marxism, organizing, labor, electoral strategy, and more.

While this episode was immediately released for the public at large, for early access to other episodes as well as other gifts (books, t-shirts, pins) sign up for our Patreon to help us fund this operation.

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Super Tuesday Special

Donald, Parker, and Christian are joined by one of the greatest political commentators of our time, Jake from Swampside Chats, to discuss the struggle between Social-Democracy and Woke Liberalism in the Democratic Party. What lies ahead? How can the left benefit from the Bernie movement/campaign? Are Boomers holding us back? Join us for a discussion on a historic election.

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Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition

For this episode, Parker and Donald welcome Cosmonaut editor and writer Medway Baker on to Canadasplain the Westminster system. Join us as we put on our inner socdem wonk to discover what went wrong for the Labour Party in the recent UK election.

 

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From NPC to PMC

Parker & Donald welcome Jake from Swampside Chats on to discuss the professional-managerial class. What is the PMC, its relation to other classes, and its role in contemporary capitalist society? We discuss this and more, including topics like the Democratic primary, Marxology, Brexit, intersectionality, and Ben & Jerry’s.

For this episode we read:

The Professional-Managerial Class by Barbara and John Ehrenreich (part 1 and part 2)

Professional Managerial Chasm by Gabriel Winant

N+1 and the PMC: A Debate About Moving On

Intro music is The Internationale, arrangement, and recording by Christian Cail

Outro Music is Yuppie Rap by Mike Saad and Bill O’Neil

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For the Unity of Marxists: A Response to Fog & Storm

Rosa Janis and Parker McQueeney respond to “DSA Convention: Fog & Storm,” arguing that the approach the authors argue for de-emphasizes issues of political struggle. 

The intent of this article is to engage in a good-faith critique of another that was published recently by Cosmonaut, “DSA National Convention: Fog and Storm “by Gabriel Pierre & Miah Simone. In writing this we hope not only to create a polite dialogue on tactics and ideology but to lay out a “Macnairist” position for the future of the DSA. We only begrudgingly label ourselves, along with others on the editorial board of Cosmonaut, as Macnairist because we derive our politics from the work of the British Marxist Mike Macnair, particularly the politics laid out in his book Revolutionary Strategy. However, the task we set out for ourselves is not simply to follow the word of Macnair but to adopt the theoretical developments of his work in the context of the particularities of the United States. This involves working within the DSA and other organizations like Marxist Center to unite Marxists around a clear minimum-maximum program to form a mass party-movement. Standing in the way of this goal is petty factionalism which turns what should be even-handed discussions of issues into an all-out sectarian brawl. The article that we are responding to is tainted by that obfuscating brawl in its analysis of DSA, using a faulty typology to argue in favor of the political line of the DSA Build caucus (though they claim to not be caucus) as an opposition to the Bread and Roses caucus. This is not to say that the Bread and Roses caucus is not guilty of any errors or wrongdoing, There is, however, no meaningful reason to privilege Build over Bread and Roses.

The Problem of Typology

Gabriel Pierre & Miah Simone open their article by describing the way in which the struggles within the DSA are usually framed: the narrative of centralizers (Bread and Roses) vs decentralizers (the Libertarian Socialist Caucus and Build DSA). While being somewhat accurate, this framing ignores the strategic differences between these factions. They view the factions from the perspective of what they actually do rather than focusing on their ideological divides to categorize them, which on paper sounds like a good idea. The problem is the typology they use, which is that the US Left supposedly has only four tendencies (lifted from Sophia Burns). This typology is incredibly limiting and they do not apply it accurately. The tendencies go as follows:

Government Socialists — Government socialists are pragmatic above all else. They exist either explicitly within the “grassroots progressive” Democratic Party faction, or else as local-level political players within its broad sphere of influence. While they disagree about the ultimate goal of the reforms they pursue (some want outright communism at some unspecified future point, while others think a Sweden-style system is enough), they are united in their policy-focused, realpolitik approach. Winnable reform fights are their bread and butter. They would rather impact policy by “getting their hands dirty” than retain “ideological purity” at the cost of actual influence. 

Protest Militants —These view government socialists with contempt, seeing little difference between them and the outright liberals with whom they collaborate. Protest militants tend to stay away from policy campaigns and electoral since in their view, protest and “power in the streets” is what really matters.

Expressive Hobbyists — Many expressive hobbyists attend the same demonstrations as protest militants, but for them, the point isn’t exciting “revolutionary” confrontation. Rather, they’re the alphabet-soup sects that bring their own signs and start their own chants to “raise consciousness.” They hold academic conferences to talk about the latest developments in radical theory, form endless study circles, and start online journals to read each other’s analysis. Different sub-tendencies prefer social-media arguing and meme-making, seeking faculty or progressive-media jobs, selling newspapers at whatever protest is in the news this week, or making zines with their friends.

Base-Builders — Base-builders start by recognizing that in the US, the working class exists in economic terms, but does not exist as what Marx called a “class-for-itself”: a class organized through its own infrastructure of institutions, capable of consciously contesting with other classes for social power. Because such an organized base for mass socialism is absent, base-builders think the top leftist priority should be to establish one. 

The first major problem with this typology is that it is completely ahistorical in terms of understanding how leftist organizations functioned during the 20th century. While it may be true now that plenty of leftist organizations are limited in their capacities to the point where they are limited to only one of these tactics, in the 20th century every successful mass organization from the early German Social Democratic Party to the Black Panther Party pursued multiple routes of organizing at the same time. The German SPD engaged in elections and pushed for democratic reforms while creating newspapers, schools, cultural and athletic clubs. The Black Panther Party pursued what could be called base-building in the form of their Serve the People programs, yet they still ran candidates for local offices and taught theory to people through their regular publications. No successful mass party could ever possibly fit within one category of this typology as it is merely describing all the functions that are necessary and developed simultaneously with each other (propaganda, engaging in the battle of democracy, “base building” etc). 

The second problem with the four tendencies typology is that there is no meaningful distinction between the practices of “community organizers” (which would fall under the category of ‘protest militants’) and the actual practices of “base-builders” beyond radical posturing. In fact, even liberal activist NGOs seek to organize poor people into a mass base through things such things as tenant unions, community organizations, etc. Red Guards Austin attempted to do the kind of organizing that is described by Sophia Burns as unique to the “base building” tendency while still being “protest militants.” To pretend that base-building is a new tendency rather than common practice among leftists of almost all shapes and sizes is fundamentally absurd. 

There’s an overarching reason for “base-building” not being a real tendency on the left. That is that, for all the pretenses of it being a meaningful strategy for the left, it has no real strategy. Base-builders do not lay out a path for taking power but focus on what is essential community organizing because they are desperate to avoid the real ideological differences among them: the divide between anarchists, communists, and socialists and their approaches to the political program. In her essay, Burns, along with many other (but not all) theorists of base-building, seeks to sidestep any questions of the political program, the road to power, and post-revolutionary society in order to pursue unity in practice. While being fine in the short-term, this will lead to major conflicts and disunity in the future when the mass base for socialism exists but is rendered completely befuddled as to what to do with their newfound strength. Even though Burns has abandoned the framework that she initially set out in her essay “What is the Left?”, the authors of “Fog and Storm” still use the typology of “Four Tendencies.” Many who initially embraced the idea of base-building as a tendency have given up on it as well, as people to the right of them (such as DSA Build) have adopted the framework.

An Error of Analysis

As alluded to earlier, Pierre & Simone do not accurately apply Sophia Burns’s flawed typology to DSA internal conflict, which on the surface appears to describe the rift between the Bread & Roses caucus and Build DSA (the Libertarian Socialist Caucus gets lost in the shuffle as they are barely talked about in the article). Since The B&R caucus is focused on electoral strategy, in particular that of the “dirty break” with the Democratic Party to split the party into a new labor party through the weaponization of the Bernie Sanders campaign, this would fit them into the category of government socialists, as Pierre & Simone say in the article, while Build DSA is founded on the principles of base building, fitting them into the base building category. While the description of Bread & Roses as government socialists is a definite fit, if we follow Sophia Burns typology (as Pierre & Simone do), Build DSA fails to fit into the category of base-builders on closer inspection. To quote from the Build DSA website:

“For generations, activists pitted tactics like direct action against tactics like electoral politics. For so long, activists in the street wouldn’t and couldn’t work with politicians in the halls of institutional power. We must work with both. We must see tactics in context and decide when and how to deploy each. Electoral victories are not an end unto themselves. Those victories must serve the movement. Direct action shouldn’t happen in a vacuum or for its own sake, independent of larger goals or a broader strategy. The working class isn’t identical to the labor movement. We must keep one foot in the institutions, one foot in the streets.”

This makes DSA Build a combination between protest militants and government socialists as ‘direct action’ is used to spur on reform; if we are following Burns’ typology we would label them militant reformists. This also goes back to the more significant weakness of Burns’s typology: trying to ignore ideological differences in favor of practical differences. This is an inaccurate understanding of the relation between theory and practice, due to the fact that it does not take into account how theoretical differences would inform practice and vice versa. As a result, DSA Build goes in the direction of becoming an ideologically incoherent mishmash of liberal activism and reformism because there is no one thinking about programmatic strategy. 

Some of Build’s proposals mentioned in Pierre & Simone’s article that failed had the stated goal of moving the DSA’s “…composition to more closely mirror the composition of the class as a whole – which includes many oppressed and marginalized peoples” included a by-law change (“Nobody too Poor for DSA”) that would essentially abolish dues. While supposedly aiming to be inclusive, this was another tactic to limit the funds of DSA as a national organization, but perhaps a much worse effect of it would be to get rid of the pre-party, membership-driven form that DSA is struggling to grow into. Dues are a method of giving the rank-and-file of an organization material ownership and investment in the organization. It is ironic that the people pushing for dues abolition were the group accusing the other side of wanting to turn DSA into an “NGO-style organization” since this is basically what it would become without dues from rank-and-file members. In DSA, dues are already extremely low, and monthly dues are optional with most members contributing low annual dues. If anything, DSA’s dues should be higher, monthly, and mandatory. It is, of course, true that people who cannot afford a monthly five or ten-dollar buy-in to DSA should be able to join DSA. The solution to this is making dues sponsorship (which already exists) more streamlined and easy to access. There will never be a dearth of comrades willing to pitch in a few bucks to swell the ranks of an organization.

While the decentralist coalition viewed itself as a ‘left opposition’ on identity and electoral issues, in truth it was nothing of the sort.  It may be true that many in DSA who consider themselves communists (who are only against centralization under the hegemonic ‘social-democratic’ politics of Bread and Roses) are members or sympathizers of Build, the coalition is not politically coherent and, in classic popular front style, the politics of the more radical are subsumed by those on their right. In a way, the soft-Maoist and anarcho-liberal combination of Build is reminiscent of the 1980s rainbow coalition. On some issues, the decentralist coalition found itself sharply to the right of its opponents. One such example was the ‘candidate litmus test’ resolution, which would have implemented a democratic socialist minimum program that candidates at any level would have to adhere to. This resolution failed; Build whipped against it and no doubt its communist members voted it down because it was a ‘centralizing’ and ‘electoral’ resolution, despite the fact that it actually limited the ability of DSA to endorse bourgeois liberal Democrats.   

On the other hand, the reputation of Bread & Roses in the decentralist camp and on the wider left isn’t necessarily wrongly deserved. Bread & Roses represents the dominant ideas of DSA as a whole, and the writers and editors of Jacobin seem broadly aligned with the caucus, as well as older socialists who have recently come to DSA from third camp Trotskyist (Draperist) groups like the ISO and Solidarity. Some of these members spoke up against the Cuba solidarity resolution, for example, as a result of this ideological heritage. Because their primary goal is to win the left-wing of the Sanders movement to democratic socialism, over the last few years Jacobin and its milieu has mostly oriented towards dedicated liberals rather than towards the socialist left and the working class. Obviously this has had an adverse effect on their political content. While Bread & Roses clearly states they desire a ‘dirty break’ with the Democratic Party towards a democratic socialist/labor party, there is no real blueprint or discipline on a strategy for political class independence, and moreover, they view the ‘ballot line issue’ as essentially unimportant.   

The Way Forward 

While their analysis of the situation may be incorrect, there are points that are worth noting in Pierre & Simone’s article. We agree that progress has been made by the DSA to address the issues of imperialism and settler colonialism, and should be defended by Marxists within the DSA. We also agree that attempts to circumvent democratic procedure by any faction is opportunistic, even if we are not “decentralizers”, and further agree that any meaningful mass organization should not be reduced to that of a theory-sect, which means allowing for a wide range of factions to exist and debate inside the mass organization. We follow a “Macnairist” commitment to programmatic unity, which differs from theoretical unity in that programmatic unity is based around a series of concrete political demands that establishes the basis for both the dictatorship of the proletariat and the upper phase of communism in a clear program. This is counterposed to having organizational unity based along the lines of theory (metaphysics, methodology, or various political-economic theories that fall under the category of Marxism). In favoring programmatic unity over theoretical unity, we allow for the party to have a functional internal democracy with open factions and debates existing within as opposed to theory-sects which seek to impose a one-size-fits-all view of the world as the basis for a revolutionary movement. 

To elaborate on the last point, programmatic unity is the joining of Marxists around a clear set of demands that establish the dictatorship of the proletariat (or socialist republic, cooperative commonwealth, etc.) in the minimum form and communism in the maximum form which will be the framework of a mass party. We hope to achieve this end by engaging in polemics with other Marxists, winning comrades to our position and working with other theoretical camps of Marxists who still disagree with us on specifics towards the creation of an independent mass socialist party. This is how the original socialist mass movements formed out of the swamp of early socialist sects. Seeing as we are essentially forced to start over with the breakdown of the workers’ movement through the detour of the short 20th century, we must wade through the swamp and drag each other, as comrades, towards the shore of Marxist programmatic unity.

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Building Revolution in the USA: Notes on Marxist Center Conference, 2018

Parker McQueeney and Donald Parkinson report back and give suggestions for moving forward after having attended the 2018 Marxist Center conference, where multiple local socialist organizations aimed to unify into a national organization. 

Unity was overwhelmingly the spirit of the 2018 Marxist Center Conference

On the final weekend of November 2018, communists from every corner of the continental United States shuffled their way into the James Berger lecture hall of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs to take part in what was more of a congress than a conference, the second such of Marxist Center. Built on top of the old Cragmor coal mines, the lecture hall in the famously conservative city (even back in the days of the 1903 Colorado Labor Wars, when the Springs were home to many of the mine owners) was, that weekend, adorned with red flags flanking the stage and draping the walls.

Delegates representing 24 local organizations (some, like the Pacific Northwest’s Communist Labor Party, have multiple chapters) were augmented by multiple organizations attending as observers, as well as dozens of individuals not associated with any group. This was perhaps the first time dozens of disparate socialist groups in the US combined to form a national organization since at least the New Communist Movement of the 1970s and the formation of the CP(ML) from the October League; but more importantly, this is the first group formed in this way across ideological boundaries, developing its line through democratic deliberation rather than inherited positions, in at least a century.

What unites all the groups in Marxist Center is not adherence to a particular ideological school of Marxism, but a commitment to a general strategy of base-building. Base-building, simply put, is organizing the working class into institutions that are vehicles of collective struggle. This can mean challenging the rule of capitalists through industrial or tenants’ unions, or it can include things like mutual aid associations and cooperatives. Essentially, the aim of base-building is to build a ‘dual power’ to the capitalist state, creating a workers’ society of mass organizations that are independent of any capitalist political party. Some call this strategy dual power, while others insist on more precise usage of the word dual power that describes a situation where the working class has formed a parallel sovereignty to the capitalist state. Either way, by focusing on unity over a basic strategy instead of ideology, Marxist Center groups look to carve out space outside the dual leftist traditions of protest culture and sectarianism.

Prominent Communist artist Boots Riley speaks on the first night of the conference

The Cultural Merger Formula

The first night of the conference saw the largest turnout, bolstered by UCCS students eager to take part in the Sorry to Bother You screening and the Q&A with filmmaker Boots Riley. In his talk, Riley emphasized the importance of a hands-on approach to class struggle. Echoing Ellen Wood’s seminal book Retreat from Class, Riley told audience members that “except through rhetoric, the Left has left behind class struggle,” that organizing should take place primarily at work, where people spend the majority of their waking time, and that for the left, struggle has become an extracurricular activity. His talk illuminated aspects of the film, especially his conception of what could be called the ‘cultural merger formula.’ The classical Marxist ‘merger formula’ was Kautsky’s, and later Lenin’s, idea that Marx’s thought, and the Social Democratic movement generally, marked the “aggregation of various, often apparently contrasting domains into a higher unity,” that of natural with social sciences, English political economy with French materialism and German idealism, theory with praxis, and most directly, the socialist movement with the working class.1 Sorry to Bother You presents this aggregation not with socialism and the workers’ movement, which as anyone knows is all but dead in the United States. Rather, it is between class struggle, social justice movements, and what Riley called spectacle, as symbolized by Tessa Thompson’s character Detroit, a sculptor and performance artist as well as a protest militant of the Left Eye Movement, which seems to be loosely based on the Occupy-era anarchist protest scene. That Riley would conceive of a ‘cultural merger formula’ makes sense considering his background in organizations that draw their heritage from the New Left rainbow coalition. Commenting on the Occupy movement, Riley mentioned its fetish for decentralization and its failure to congeal into a class-independent entity was, in part, a response to a dry and dogmatic application of professional revolutionism. His initial reaction to Occupy was “what the fuck is this shit?” because of its lack of a clear independent class vision, though he also remarked that he saw people not get involved for this reason, which he views as a mistake. Perhaps a contemporary analogue to this is France’s gilets jaunes. Riley isn’t wrong to point out that the Left in recent years has been over-reliant on what he calls spectacle, though at the MC conference, he was preaching to the choir.

Riley reiterated the notion that you can get 50,000 people in the street to protest a war in Iraq or Vietnam, but without a militant labor movement shutting shit down, it won’t get anywhere. Perhaps coincidentally, there seemed to be a tactical and practical theoretical unity between Riley’s talk and the strategy of the overwhelming majority of base-builders in attendance. Namely, this involved the desire for direct proletarian organizing. Riley mentioned that before the longshoreman’s union was formed, the unskilled dockworkers were seen as essentially unorganizable; by the mid-20th century, they were one of the most radical and militant unions in the US. For Riley, the entire working class today can be seen as occupying the position of the unorganized dockworkers. This was an important message for an audience who were themselves pushing against today’s “common sense” that the working class is unorganizable today and is no longer a subject of social change through its own self-organizing activity.

One important topic that was conspicuously absent in Riley’s revolutionary strategy was the question of the role of the party. This ambiguity would generally carry over through the whole weekend—Marxist Center delegates and observers seemed to have a healthy skepticism of the history of endless microsects declaring themselves ‘the party,’ though rather than debate the question in person, the can was kicked down the road for later consideration. This carried over into the debate on the Points of Unity the next afternoon.

Communist Party of America convention in 1919

Building an Organization: The Points of Unity Debate

Scheduled for two hours in the morning, the discussion concerning the organization’s Points of Unity (POU) took three times the length it was allotted. This is something that the organizers should have perhaps foreseen, but an even larger issue was the lack of any democratic procedures on how to count votes, who could actually vote, who could add to the discussion and debate, etc. For example, one organization officially recognized at the conference was DSA Refoundation, which only a few weeks prior had seen its leadership unanimously decide to dissolve the national caucus over personal drama. However, most (former) Refoundation members in attendance were uninformed they counted as voting delegates until Sunday, after the points of unity debate had been completed. It was a messy process, to say the least.

Eventually, a general process was decided upon, and after it was clear the debate would take up much more time than planned, it was decided that only delegates would be able to contribute to discussion. One major political disagreement that recurred was whether or not the POU should be simplified to a more basic reading level. A minority of delegates considered the language to be elitist and inaccessible to the working class; the majority faction countered with the argument that a POU was not a document for propaganda or educational purposes, but an internal standard of political consensus. Most of the other debate surrounded specific wording and the subsequent political implications. Going forward, Marxist Center will have to clarify the unique role of a POU document as distinct from a program.

Towards the end of the afternoon, a workable POU had been drafted by a room of around 200 communists. The document was unanimously accepted the next morning after a small group of dogmatic Marxist-Leninists from the hosting organization, surrounding the circle of the Proles of the Round Table podcast, walked out of the meeting in protest. During the debates, the “CSS Seven” were loudly booing and chastising contributors to such an extent that leadership had to ask them several times to curtail their behavior. They seemed to be unaware that democratic centralism should, in fact, be democratic in practice, that not every line on the POU would reflect Xi Jinping Thought, and that everyone at the conference would have to compromise. Later that night, they took to social media to attempt to discredit MC. Some of their concerns were legitimate (like the lack of a voting process), but they also attempted to weaponize the identities of trans women and people of color (none of whom actually agreed with the CSS Seven) to discredit two of the event organizers. These complaints were all made in a bad-faith manner via online trolling. These seven people were of course not the only ones disappointed in some way by the POU, but in any democratic process, compromises must be made: not every individual is bound to get their way. It is significant that the document was accepted unanimously. What matters is not that a perfect document that adequately reflects all of the revolutionary politics we hold true to was produced (such a thing may not even be possible), but that a Points of Unity document was agreed upon democratically by delegates from all attending groups—it gives Marxist Center legitimacy. Democracy means that everyone has a say, not that everyone will get their way. For this reason, one can say that the drafting and voting on the POU was a success, albeit a rocky one.

Also voted on were the requirements for groups wishing to affiliate with Marxist Center. These conditions must be met by the respective groups, who may then vote internally to affiliate. A delegate council will be elected from the groups that have affiliated, and it will act as a sort of proto-central committee for running the organization between conferences. There are plans to eventually allow for members-at-large (those who are not members of organizations affiliated to the Marxist Center but wish to be involved in the organization as a whole), who will be represented by one delegate on the council. This is a good idea, because it encourages members who are at-large to organize and do actual political work on the ground. It is required that to even be an at-large member one must be involved in some kind of organizing. While this part of the conference might have seemed politically benign after the Points of Unity debate, this very issue is actually what caused the initial split in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks! The Bolsheviks required members of the party to be active in a party organization, whereas the Mensheviks allowed those who weren’t politically active to be members on paper. This move on the part of Marxist Center is more likely inspired (wisely so) by the fact that despite its relatively large numbers on paper, most DSA members aren’t actually active in any kind of organizing. A political organization needs to build actual community and trust amongst its members rather than merely be an atomized group of individuals. These limitations on membership may be seen as contrary to the idea of a mass party, but are really intelligent political measures that will promote the growth of the organization into something that is actually rooted in the lives of working people.

Dramatization of Bolshevik/Menshevik split.

One significant political debate that occurred during this portion of the conference was about language in which, as a section under the affiliation requirements document ended up reading, “Preference in the election of delegates will be given to people representing a marginalized community”. While the desire to counteract a seemingly hegemonic white majority is correct, this is vague language, inappropriately calling for preferential voting based on identity, and doesn’t offer a specific policy of affirmative action. How does a national organization give preference in elections when delegates are elected by the rank-and-file? A better solution would be to form three caucuses; a women’s caucus, an LGBTQ caucus, and a people of color caucus, and give each a seat on the delegate council (after the conference two of these caucuses actually formed: the POC caucus and a women and femme caucus, though this leaves out gay and trans men, as well as non-binary people). This way, disproportionate representation that favors the interests of marginalized people can be ensured without language that merely suggests that people vote for delegates based on someone’s identity.

After the business of voting on the Points of Unity and affiliation requirements, the most important proceedings were workshops. These were all very informative, covering issues of cooperatives, internal organization norms and culture, tenant organizing, and workplace organizing. Comrades who were experienced organizers shared examples of their successes, engaging in a genuine dialogue on tactical issues of working-class organizing that is all too rare in the US. What was impressive about the Marxist Center conference was how non-academic and proletarian it was, both in terms of composition and content. Issues of theory were discussed in the halls, but the valuable time that was available couldn’t be squandered on the typical seminars on the correct reading of Althusser or the tributary mode of production. This isn’t to say that such a culture of education shouldn’t be developed, as we must form intellectual institutions autonomous from academia, but the tasks at hand require that we get organized first, and this was rightly considered a priority.

The Debate Never Ends

Almost immediately after the conference, the Points of Unity sparked online debate. The first criticisms that were published came from a group that had neither delegates nor observers at the conference, the Austin Revolutionary Organizing Committee (AROC). AROC’s critiques of the Points of Unity essentially boil down to the concern that Marxist Center has not dedicated itself to becoming a Marxist-Leninist-style vanguard party. Of course there is more to AROC’s critique, but their argument amounts to:

  • Mao’s Mass Line is a more effective organizing technique than base-building
  • The need for a party is not clearly called for in the Points of Unity
  • The language of “dictatorship of the proletariat” is not included in the Points of Unity
  • There is a lack of a clear position on Actually Existing Socialism
  • Adequate measures have not been taken to prevent liberal degeneration into reformist NGOism
  • Acceptance of ideological plurality has meant that anarchists and “Kautsky revivalists” will be involved, which will poison the organization’s politics if they become influential enough.

These criticisms were not particularly well received, as it came across as a small Marxist-Leninist organization lecturing a group with branches around the country that aims to escape past dogmatism on how they don’t properly conform to the Marxist-Leninist vision of party building.

AROC’s criticisms were met with an entry from the Left Wind blog titled Let the Parties Hit the Floor. The response contains some salient points and others that create more confusion than necessary. While correctly pointing out that it would be premature to declare Marxist Center “the party,” the article seems at best skeptical towards any long term strategy that orients Marxist Center to building a revolutionary party. To cite the article:

“Why is “revolution” any less precise than “the party” or “the dictatorship of the proletariat”? Furthermore, many or even most so-called revolutionary “parties” in the U.S. are embedded in precisely this protest culture and ambulance chasing, not even to mention the reformist communist parties such as the PCI and PCF. How would becoming yet another group trying to become The Party avoid this pitfall? The correlation between AROC’s “party-building” strategy and successfully avoiding reformism/protest culture is left as an exercise for the reader.”

In essence, this is the claim that because past attempts at building mass revolutionary parties have failed, an attempt to build a mass party today will follow the same path. What Let the Parties Hit the Floor does not answer is what an alternative revolutionary strategy could look like. If party building is inevitably a road towards reformism, then what form of organization is preferable? The idea seems to be that through spontaneous organizing and struggle an alternative form to the party will develop, yet why we should we expect that this alternative will ever arise? Instead of understanding why past political parties have failed and applying these lessons while trying to form a mass party, the hope is that a whim of history will provide us with a new form that transcends past ones. Using a common understanding of what constitutes a party, is Marxist Center not essentially in the process of building a revolutionary party anyway, even if it’s not a party in name?

Between AROC and Left Wind, we must find a golden mean, so to speak. AROC’s call for fidelity to dogmatic Marxism-Leninism should be rejected: an organization like Marxist Center must develop its own tendency of Marxism for the 21st century in the course of struggle and debate rather than copy dead traditions that have a track record of bureaucratic inflexibility. It is far more important that Marxist Center develops an actual base in the working class and shares a common commitment to revolutionary socialist politics against reformism. The details may not all be worked out yet, but there is no reason to expect them to be. At the same time, leaving the future development of an organization to the imagination alone can mean a lack of organizational cohesion and direction. While the party that AROC suggests isn’t the party we should aim for, the trajectory of Marxist Center as an organization cannot be left hanging in the air.

The path that Marxist Center takes will not be decided by a single organization or theorist; it will have to be worked out through free political debate between its militants. Rather than expecting perfection from Marxist Center immediately upon its first foundation congress, we should understand that our aim is to develop politics for the 21st century that fits in the modern terrain of capitalism. To effectively do this, we must remain open-minded while simultaneously developing a long term strategy for overthrowing capitalism and constructing a proletarian counter-sovereignty to the bourgeois state. While actors like AROC don’t offer us the answers they claim to have, the questions raised around party building and a political program should be discussed and debated, not seen as mere distractions from bread-and-butter organizing.

If members of Marxist Center decide there is a need for a party, the question of what kind of party remains. A party is simply an organization of political actors organized around a certain strategy and vision for change: a program. It is essential that Marxist Center does not become another micro-sect that clings to a certain theoretical vision of Marxism with a priori shibboleths that define the group’s politics, whether Marxist-Leninist, Trotskyist, left-communist, etc. The organization must be internally democratic and oriented towards building working class political power independent from the bourgeois parties. Without this, any debates over the correct political line, while potentially useful intellectual exercises, will be effectively pointless. In this sense, Marxist Center is going in the right direction, emphasizing a strategy of base building and a commitment to revolutionary socialism and democracy.

Another debate spurred by the Points of Unity was on the question of the state, particularly language around the state. One point of unity is that we must “demand and organize democratic worker control over the means of production and state,” while another argues against administering capitalism, even when holding political office. These aspects of the POU were perhaps the most controversial and led to the group Unity and Struggle choosing not to affiliate, as they saw these points as being “pro-state,” while the group defines itself as an anti-state communist collective [CORRECTION: While Unity and Struggle disagree with the point about the state in the POU, they still intend to affiliate]. Yet what exactly do these planks of the POU entail?

“Democratic control over the state” could mean seizing the bourgeois state apparatus and using it for communist ends, against the advice given by Marx in Civil War In France. This interpretation of the plank contradicts the point that argues against administering the capitalist state. While the important point regarding the “smashing” of the bourgeois state may be missing, it’s an unfair assessment to assume that this is calling for wielding the readymade state apparatus. A better interpretation of this plank sees it calling for both:  

a) fighting for increased democracy within the bourgeois state, thus giving the proletariat more political freedom to organize a mass base in society

b) a revolutionary state established after a revolutionary break that would be democratically controlled by the masses of workers.

While the wording regarding the state in the POU may need clarification, there is no reason to think that this represents a step away from revolutionary Marxism. Inserting the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” in the POU wouldn’t necessarily clarify this either, as the meaning of this phrase varies wildly depending on one’s tendency. For some, it can mean “all power to the workers’ councils,” while for others it can mean the rule of the vanguard party.

Another issue not tackled in the Points of Unity, as pointed out by AROC’s critique, is that of Actually Existing Socialism (AES). By not taking up a line that defends or rejects the examples of AES throughout history, AROC sees Marxist Center as lacking theoretical clarity on its historical tasks. Point taken, but what’s the big deal? We do not need to all have the same opinion on the Cold War to work together in a common organization at this point. For the socialist projects of the 20th century, the ultimate verdict still remains as to what their role in the grand schema of history truly will turn out to be. It is important that Marxist Center does not enforce a stance that condemns all the revolutions to irrelevance. This can amount to a concession to all the talking points of mid-century anti-communism while promising some ideal with no critical relation to these historical experiences whatsoever. Marxist Center must also have the freedom to be openly critical of AES from the standpoint of fighting for communism. It is more important that we find unity on programmatic points of political relevance rather than theoretical interpretations of whether the USSR was ‘state-capitalist’, ‘lower-stage communism’, or a “non-mode of production.” When it comes to unified political positions, what matters is that we emphasize democracy, transparency, and accountability that will act against the bureaucratic degeneration that is at the core of most principled critiques of past and existing socialist regimes. Where these arguments do come to prominence is on the issue of strategy: do we aim for national roads to socialism, or for world revolution? This is a question of long term strategy, one that seems too distant to have any practical effect at this juncture. Yet at some point, these more difficult questions of long term strategy will need to be confronted.

Groups like Unity and Struggle who are skeptical of the Points of Unity, yet are generally for a revolutionary socialist project of building independent working-class institutions, should put aside theoretical differences over the question of the state. While the language around the state in the Points of Unity may raise more questions than it answers, it is not incompatible with revolutionary socialism as it stands. In order to engage in this project of attempted unity, Marxist Center will have to make compromises with other groups on ideological questions. This is the case for any mass organization. Internal democracy is of the highest priority, and drafting constitutional and foundational documents that are living, subject to a developed and thoroughly democratic process, is essential to a culture of internal democracy. This way, organizations like Unity and Struggle can join Marxist Center and argue for their perspective within the organization, and even form a faction representing their position on the state. There is loud fanfare about anarchist influence in Marxist Center, a boogeyman that is largely overblown and is not a legitimate reason to double down on the sort of ideological rigidity that AROC calls for. A minority of anarchists will not be a threat to the organizational cohesion of Marxist Center as long as it maintains democratic norms and accountable leadership through a balanced centralism. In the end, the majority rules, and the majority of delegates from Marxist Center affiliates did not vote for anti-state language in the POU. Adequately clarifying the issue of state and revolution will not be settled in a unity document, but rather through open discussion and debate in relation to our concrete tactical and strategic struggles.

Moving Forward

Moving forward, Marxist Center will have to develop unity on a political level, not just on the strategic level of base-building for revolution. This does not mean any sect should impose its views on Marxist Center as a whole, but that there should be open and democratic process of determining the future direction of the organization, guided by accountable and thoughtful leaders. The importance of leadership is another thing that was evident at the Marxist Center conference, even if it was hardly discussed. In the future, the task of training leaders who have actual influence in proletarian communities is key to Marxist Center’s success.

But what does success look like? Our suggestion is that Marxist Center should orient itself towards building a revolutionary mass party. This could happen by Marxist Center aiming to become such a party itself, acting as a locus of unity for independent communist groups while militants ditch the world dinosaur sects, and becoming an organization that trains future cadre who can provide leadership for a mass party. The process of what this would look like and how it would work is, of course, undecided—but to formulate a course of action, a destination must be set. We should not aim to copy some other revolutionary organization of the past, like the early SPD, the Bolsheviks, Mao’s CCP, the Black Panthers, or the parties of the New Communist Movement; but past successes and failure of party building must be plugged into our strategic considerations.

While some in Marxist Center object to the idea of party building, the only alternative suggested is existing as a network of autonomous groups in a loose federation, acting as ‘catalyzers’ in struggles. The idea of building a party that will lead revolution is rejected in favor of a ‘hands off’ approach that fosters the creativity of spontaneous mass movements. Advocacy for this approach can be found in groups such as Unity and Struggle, DSA Communist Caucus, and Organization for a Free Society, who seem to represent the anti-state communist line of thought. Organization for a Free Society sums up the activity of their ideal of communist political organization in their pamphlet Communism From Below as “supporting and strengthening informal practices” which are “elements of a communist alternative that emerge informally through everyday practices of mutual aid and collective refusal, especially within contexts of hardship, crisis, disaster, etc.” Unity and Struggle argue for “minority organizations of militants” such as “rank-and-file workplace committees, networks of tenant leaders, study circles or media platforms” which “carry over the experiences of past movements and provide the nuclei to coordinate future ones.” While these organizations do not hold identical positions, the common idea seems to be that a communist minority engages in struggles as they arise, guiding them through some form of education or agitation. The hope is that through these movements becoming powerful under the influence of a militant minority, the movement will lead to a rupture with capitalism.

By hoping that in a revolutionary moment the working class will be able to form its own sovereignty and figure out the problems of organizing a revolutionary change, this approach leaves too much to chance. It is also contradictory: it is fine with forming minority organizations that try to influence popular struggles from within but sees the idea of building a revolutionary mass party that wins the working class to socialism as elitist because it brings consciousness to the masses from without.  This vulgar teleological approach leaves vital questions of politics to existing political authorities or the arbitrary influence of revolutionary minorities. Because of this alone, the strategy has little capacity for revolutionary success: it gambles on the ability of the militant minority to pull off a putsch against the constitutional order. It is far more democratic that a majority of politically active workers are first won over to communism through the activity of a mass party-movement than that a minority organization attempt to exert some kind of ‘invisible dictatorship’ over a mass movement that somehow guides it in the correct direction without  becoming ‘official leaders.’

To use a military metaphor, we must first build our army and then go into battle, once we are strong enough to win. Those who argue for the militant minority strategy seem to think that we should form small guerilla units that will wait for the battle to begin, and then try to influence the army (i.e. the working class) from within. Put simply, in terms of winning a revolution, the former makes more sense than the latter. But it also makes sense in terms of working-class self-emancipation: we want the working class to consciously self-organize around communist politics and build a party that they genuinely control, not have their spontaneous energies be channeled by a vanguard of theoretically advanced communist wizards.

Socialist movements should not simply become front groups for sects nor tail spontaneous social movements but should build their own power. It is more important for communists to win than for the movements of our time be pure of partisan political influence, fully autonomous from outside influences, in order to preserve some kind of ‘revolutionary authenticity’ that is lost when contact with high politics is made. The class struggle is a political struggle, one where communists must win hegemony in the labor movement to transform it into a force capable of leading to the mutual ruin of all contending classes. Hoping that a small minority with the right ideas will simply push struggles in the right direction in a way that challenges the power of the capitalist state won’t cut it. We must construct a powerful working class sovereignty capable of seizing power from capitalism before a revolutionary moment can happen. And to construct this sovereignty is to form a mass party organized around a program to overthrow the capitalist state, form a workers’ republic/dictatorship of the proletariat, and begin the construction of socialism.

Marxist Center, moving forward as a collective of organizations oriented around base-building and political independence, cannot shirk questions of political line, program, and strategy. There is an understandable fear of tackling these questions head-on; are they even relevant if we don’t have a mass base? Will it signal the beginning of sectarian fragmentations as disagreements drive organizers apart? Either way, as the organization grows, divisive political questions will come to the fore and will challenge the unity of the organization. There is no ideal road to revolution, no certain path we can take that will avoid the risks and pitfalls of either reformism or sectarianism. To move forward is to make wagers on which strategy will be a success for building socialism, and no matter how guided these wagers are by clear-headed analysis, there is still an element of risk. To organize the working class for revolution we will have to make many wagers and take many risks. The creation of Marxist Center represents a potentially historic juncture in the US left; as Boots Riley said at the beginning of the conference, “if we play our cards right, we CAN win.” Marxist Center could be the vehicle for that victory, but it must continue the precedent it has set for internal democracy, and it must continue its base-building in the working class. To quote the great revolutionary Leon Trotsky:

And what if we don’t succeed?

Should we not succeed, that would almost certainly signify in the given historical environment the victory of fascism [Or, interchangeably, the collapse of the global ecosystem]. But on the eve of great battles the revolutionist does not ask what will be if he fails but how to perform that which means success. It is possible, it can be done – therefore it must be done.2

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Why Have a Political Program?

Parker McQueeney lays out the case for building a party around a minimum-maximum program. 

Every party pursues definite aims, whether it be a party of landowners or capitalists, on the one hand, or a party of workers or peasants, on the other… If it be a party of capitalists and factory owners, it will have its own aims: to procure cheap labour, to keep the workers well in hand, to find customers to toil harder—but, above all, so to arrange matters that the workers will have no tendency to allow their thoughts to turn towards ideas of a new social order; let the workers think that there always have been masters and always will be masters… The programme is for every party a matter of supreme importance. From the programme we can always learn what interests the party represents.

—Nikolai Bukharin and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky,
The ABC of Communism, 1920

In the Autumn of 1891, Germany’s socialist party—the Social Democratic Party of Germany, or SPD—had only the world to win. Just one year prior, the party’s chief prosecutor and preeminent tyrant of the European continent, Otto von Bismarck, was forced to resign. The Reichstag refused to renew Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist laws, which had shut down dozens of newspapers, trade unions, and socialist meetings. This all happened within the span of a month. It is safe to say that when the party met for its Congress in Erfurt, they were bolstered in a manner that European socialists had not been since the rise of the Paris Commune twenty years before. The Erfurt Program is notable for a myriad of reasons, not least of which includes the declaration that:

The German Social Democratic Party… fights for the abolition of class rule and of classes themselves, for equal rights and equal obligations for all, without distinction of sex or birth… it fights not only the exploitation and oppression of wage earners in society today, but every manner of exploitation and oppression, whether directed against a class, party, sex, or race.1

The Erfurt Program asserted, as Marx had, that socialists must fight for democratic rights within bourgeois society. With historical hindsight, it seems clear enough that capitalism cannot be abolished via a socialist party simply winning elections in a bourgeois government. In Bolivarian Venezuela, Mitterand’s France, and Tsipras’s Greece, the governing socialist parties were able to sit behind the wheel of a liberal democracy, yet none of these countries were able to meaningfully disrupt capitalism. This does not mean that basic bourgeois-democratic rights have no use to even the most revolutionary of socialists; the SPD learned under Bismarck that universal suffrage, the right to free assembly, the ability to form unions, and the abolition of censorship are all helpful to a proletariat undergoing a transformation into a “class-for-itself”. Although winning these reforms are not the first step on the path to socialism, they do clear debris that blocks the entrance. “If all the 10 demands were granted,” Friedrich Engels speculated in his critique of the Erfurt Program draft, “we should indeed have more diverse means of achieving our main political aim, but the aim itself would in no [way] have been achieved.”2

Karl Kautsky, the primary theorist behind the Erfurt Program.

The more lasting legacy the Erfurt Program had on socialist thought was in its popularization of the minimum and maximum program—though these were abstracted from Karl Marx and Jules Guesde in their program for the French Workers’ Party, eleven years prior.3Since Erfurt, the program has been the focal point for every party of the class. As Bukharin and Preobrazhensky argue in The ABC of Communism, “The programme is for every party a matter of supreme importance. From the programme we can always learn what interests the party represents.”4 Theoretically, the minimum program, which was the party’s reform platform, would win over a mass base of workers by improving their immediate conditions. When enacted in full, it would give the party the necessary mandate and class power to enable its maximum program, or the revolutionary measures required to actually eradicate the dictatorship of capital and begin the process of developing a socialist mode of production. In reality, the SPD—along with the other parties of the Second International—eschewed their maximum programs as they became gradually more entrenched into the bourgeois constitutional order. Whether in the trade union bureaucracy, the universities, or the Reichstag, the Second International’s loyalty to the capitalist state and nation eventually led the majority of its parties to abandon internationalism by siding with their respective home countries during the outbreak of World War I. It is a tragedy often lamented on the Left.

Although the term amounts to welfare state liberalism today, the social democrats of Erfurt were largely Marxists. Nevertheless, as a nominally social democratic movement appears to be re-emerging onto American politics for the first time in the life of many of its participants, what can contemporary socialists in the United States learn from the original social democrats? In many ways, the US Left is in a similar position that German social democrats found themselves in around the time of the Erfurt Congress. Both had recently come out with some unthinkable—at least to the ruling class—victories after decades of suppression and neither had ever meaningfully seen power. More importantly, the 1891 SPD and the 2018 American Left share a common primary task: the consolidation of workers into a class-for-ourselves, cognizant of our common condition and interests.

What were the minimum demands of the Erfurt Program? The first seven dealt exclusively with securing and expanding democratic-republican rights. Perhaps shockingly, many of their demands would still be progressive gains 127 years later: legal holidays on election days, ending voter suppression, popular militias in place of standing armies, free meals for school children, gender equality in the legal sphere, elected judges, and the end of capital punishment. The first seven demands read:

  • Universal, equal, and direct suffrage with secret ballot in all elections, for all citizens of the Reich over the age of twenty, without distinction of sex. Proportional representation, and, until this is introduced, legal redistribution of electoral districts after every census. Two-year legislative periods. Holding of elections on a legal holiday. Compensation for elected representatives. Suspension of every restriction on political rights, except in the case of legal incapacity.
  • Direct legislation by the people through the rights of proposal and rejection. Self-determination and self-government of the people in Reich, state, province, and municipality. Election by the people of magistrates, who are answerable and liable to them. Annual voting of taxes.
  • Education of all to bear arms. Militia in the place of the standing army. Determination by the popular assembly on questions of war and peace. Settlement of all international disputes by arbitration.
  • Abolition of all laws that place women at a disadvantage compared with men in matters of public or private law.Abolition of all laws that limit or suppress the free expression of opinion and restrict or suppress the right of association and assembly. Declaration that religion is a private matter. Abolition of all expenditures from public funds for ecclesiastical and religious purposes. Ecclesiastical and religious communities are to be regarded as private associations that regulate their affairs entirely autonomously.
  • Secularization of schools. Compulsory attendance at the public Volksschule [extended elementary school]. Free education, free educational materials, and free meals in the public Volksschulen, as well as at higher educational institutions for those boys and girls considered qualified for further education by virtue of their abilities.
  • Free administration of justice and free legal assistance. Administration of the law by judges elected by the people. Appeal in criminal cases. Compensation for individuals unjustly accused, imprisoned, or sentenced. Abolition of capital punishment.

It is important to note that although these were serious, immediate demands, some were not “realistic” nor “winnable”. Women’s suffrage was not granted in Germany until nearly 30 years after the Erfurt Program was drafted. Replacing the standing army with a militia was perhaps the most radical of all their demands: the Prussian state was highly centralized, and to eradicate the standing army would have amounted to a revolutionary rupture within the state. When drafting a political program, even when demanding reforms, it’s important for socialists not to limit our horizons to what bourgeois politicians and their apologists tell us is possible; otherwise, we are liable to again tail their inevitable sprints to the right. Ideally, a socialist program would include measures that, once undertaken, will not only improve the condition of the working class, but begin to dismantle the dictatorship of capital.

Cover of Erfurt Program, 1892

The next group of demands were in the economic sphere, and included free healthcare, burial, a progressive tax, a series of labor demands surrounding unions, the work-day, the creation of a department of labor, etc.:

  • Free medical care, including midwifery and medicines. Free burial.
  • Graduated income and property tax for defraying all public expenditures, to the extent that they are to be paid for by taxation. Inheritance tax, graduated according to the size of the inheritance and the degree of kinship. Abolition of all indirect taxes, customs, and other economic measures that sacrifice the interests of the community to those of a privileged few.
  • Fixing of a normal working day not to exceed eight hours.
  • Prohibition of gainful employment for children under the age of fourteen.
  • Prohibition of night work, except in those industries that require night work for inherent technical reasons or for reasons of public welfare.
  • An uninterrupted rest period of at least thirty-six hours every week for every worker.
  • Prohibition of the truck system.
  • Supervision of all industrial establishments, investigation and regulation of working conditions in the cities and the countryside by a Reich labor department, district labor bureaus, and chambers of labor. Rigorous industrial hygiene.
  • Legal equality of agricultural laborers and domestic servants with industrial workers; abolition of the laws governing domestics.
  • Safeguarding of the freedom of association.
  • Takeover by the Reich government of the entire system of workers’ insurance, with decisive participation by the workers in its administration.

The reason these demands were worth fighting for was twofold. Most obviously, things like political enfranchisement and universal healthcare alleviate some of the alienation caused by capitalist society. Perhaps more crucially though, these demands were posited by a working-class institution with a working-class awareness.

What is a working-class institution? Historically, they may mirror republican civic institutions, but within the class party. A good example of an institution within the SPD was its party school. Every class party needs political education, recruiting the working masses is a foolish endeavor without internal political clarification and cadre training- not to unquestioningly accept party dogmatism, but to properly apply the historical materialist methodology and critical analysis to the daily struggles of workers. In her piece on the SPD party school for the British Left magazine The Clarion, Rida Vaquas writes:

…the best demonstration of what the Party School could achieve of a project comes not from the words of its teachers, but from the legacies of its students. In a 1911 retrospective of the Party School after 5 years of its existence, Heinrich Schulz recorded the debts students owed their school experience: “A trade union official observes that he learned how to conceive of phenomena in economic life better through his school instruction, another gained a deeper insight into the whole political and trade union life, a third traces back his greater confidence against political and economic opponents to the school”. The school, when it succeeded, was a training in how to think, not what to think.5

Working class institution can take forms not only of political education but of what some socialists label “dual power” (though not in the way Lenin used the term). They have taken the form of free health clinics, breakfast programs for school children, housing, and worker cooperatives, or any number of things, but they need to be part of a larger project of working-class political struggle: the class party.

Despite the innovations of the Erfurt Program, the SPD, along with most of the parties from the Second International, voted for war credits in 1914 causing a traumatic rupture in the international socialist movement. There were, however, a few examples of the classical social democratic parties that retained their internationalist class solidarity. One of these was a party that contemporary American socialists can and should study, and it’s one of our own ancestors: the Socialist Party of America. The 1912 SPA platform, adopted in May at a congress in Indianapolis, follows a similar format to the Erfurt Program. The 106-year-old document is chillingly relevant. The introduction of its minimum program plainly states its ultimate goal:

As measures calculated to strengthen the working class in its fight for the realization of its ultimate aim, the co-operative commonwealth, and to increase its power against capitalist oppression, we advocate and pledge ourselves and our elected officers to the following program…

It starts with several paragraphs outlining the broad goals of the Socialist Party—its maximum program—declaring the nation to be “in the absolute control of a plutocracy which exacts an annual tribute of hundreds of millions of dollars from the producers.” It declares unilaterally that capitalism is the source of destitution in the working class, that “the legislative representatives of the Republican and Democratic parties remain the faithful servants of the oppressors”, and any legislation attempting at balancing the distance between classes “have proved to be utterly futile and ridiculous.” It says plainly that

there will be and can be no remedy and no substantial relief except through Socialism under which industry will be carried on for the common good and every worker receive the full social value of the wealth he creates.

The minimum demands of the 1912 SPA platform constitute a significant improvement compared to the Erfurt Program. Instead of two sections—one political, one economic—the SPA platform includes four sections: collective ownership, unemployment, industrial demands, and political demands. The collective ownership section only reinforces the point that the socialist platform when enacted should create a rupture in the class character of the state:

  • The collective ownership and democratic management of railroads, wire and wireless telegraphs and telephones, express service, steamboat lines, and all other social means of transportation and communication and of all large scale industries.
  • The immediate acquirement by the municipalities, the states or the federal government of all grain elevators, stock yards, storage warehouses, and other distributing agencies, in order to reduce the present extortionate cost of living.
  • The extension of the public domain to include mines, quarries, oil wells, forests and water power.
  • The further conservation and development of natural resources for the use and benefit of all the people . . .
  • The collective ownership of land wherever practicable, and in cases where such ownership is impracticable, the appropriation by taxation of the annual rental value of all the land held for speculation and exploitation.
  • The collective ownership and democratic management of the banking and currency system.

It is clear that the nationalization of the bourgeois state’s institutional levers of power; banks, currency, natural resources, land, distribution centers, transportation, and communications, would catalyze the disintegration of capitalist class rule. It’s important to note that these were the very first things listed on the platform.

The next section dealt with a universal jobs demand. Unlike the Erfurt Program, here the American socialists remind themselves of who their ultimate enemy is in evoking the maximum program and capitalist class “misrule”:

The immediate government relief of the unemployed by the extension of all useful public works. All persons employed on such works to be engaged directly by the government under a work day of not more than eight hours and at not less than the prevailing union wages. The government also to establish employment bureaus; to lend money to states and municipalities without interest for the purpose of carrying on public works, and to take such other measures within its power as will lessen the widespread misery of the workers caused by the misrule of the capitalist class.

This isn’t a radical demand in 2018; it’s even looking likely that Senator Bernie Sanders will make it a key point in the next presidential campaign, and he is often the first one to admit his positions are not radical. In 1912 however, before the Wagner Act of 1935 was passed, “employees… [did] not possess full freedom of association or actual liberty of contract”. The Wagner Act, also known as the National Labor Relations Act, which had legalized strikes and union organizing as well as guaranteed the right to collective bargaining, was severely gutted twelve years later under the Truman administration.

The SPA’s industrial demands contain standard labor issues that American socialists had been calling on for years, mostly dealing with workplace safety, reducing work hours, child labor laws, establishing minimum wage, etc. One calls for an establishment of a pension system. A few demands stand out, however, one prefiguring prison abolitionism calling for “the co-operative organization of the industries in the federal penitentiaries for the benefit of the convicts and their dependents.” Another calls for “forbidding the interstate transportation of the products of child labor, of convict labor and all uninspected factories and mines.” Perhaps their most creative and radical demand was “abolishing the profit system in government work and substituting either the direct hire of labor or the awarding of contracts to co-operative groups of workers.” It’s hard to imagine events like the Iraq War or the recent human disaster in Puerto Rico happening the way they did without the juicy private contracts (although there is nothing about a worker cooperative that inherently prevents it from taking part in imperial plundering).

The political demands section proposes a broad outline for transforming the state:

  • The absolute freedom of press, speech and assemblage.
  • The abolition of the monopoly ownership of patents and the substitution of collective ownership, with direct rewards to inventors by premiums or royalties.
  • Unrestricted and equal suffrage for men and women.
  • The adoption of the initiative, referendum and recall and of proportional representation, nationally as well as locally.
  • The abolition of the Senate and of the veto power of the President.
  • The election of the President and Vice-President by direct vote of the people.
  • The abolition of the power usurped by the Supreme Court of the United States to pass upon the constitutionality of the legislation enacted by Congress. National laws to be repealed only by act of Congress or by a referendum vote of the whole people.
  • Abolition of the present restrictions upon the amendment of the Constitution, so that instrument may be made amendable by a majority of the voters in a majority of the States.
  • The granting of the right of suffrage in the District of Columbia with representation in Congress and a democratic form of municipal government for purely local affairs.
  • The extension of democratic government to all United States territory.
  • The enactment of further measures for the conservation of health. The creation of an independent bureau of health, with such restrictions as will secure full liberty to all schools of practice.
  • The enactment of further measures for general education and particularly for vocational education in useful pursuits. The Bureau of Education to be made a department.
  • The separation of the present Bureau of Labor from the Department of Commerce and Labor and its elevation to the rank of a department.
  • Abolition of an federal districts courts and the United States circuit court of appeals. State courts to have jurisdiction in all cases arising between citizens of several states and foreign corporations. The election of all judges for short terms.
  • The immediate curbing of the power of the courts to issue injunctions.
  • The free administration of the law.
  • The calling of a convention for the revision of the constitution of the US.

Here the Socialist Party lists some serious alterations to the existing governmental structure. They call for the abolition of the Senate with its overrepresentation for people in less populous states, the electoral college, the presidential veto, and judicial review. They demand a process for popular recall of politicians and legislation. They even call for a new constitutional convention. All of these things would be improvements and are predicated on a big enough success of the Socialist Party to implement them (otherwise, a constitutional convention could obviously be disastrous). These demands on their own however do not constitute a rupture with the bourgeois state. It is the political demands in combination with their collective ownership demands that do, by first eviscerating the major sources of economic power from their capitalists. These measures would only constitute the beginning of a revolutionary rupture from the capitalist class rule, as the last part of the platform states,

Such measures of relief as we may be able to force from capitalism are but a preparation of the workers to seize the whole powers of government, in order that they may thereby lay hold of the whole system of socialized industry and thus come to their rightful inheritance.

The socialist magazine Jacobin, which is heavily associated with the Democratic Socialists of America (and its largest chapter in New York City) has seemingly adopted as creed what Andre Gorz named “non-reformist reforms”. Gorz believed the dichotomy of the pre-war era between militant revolution or reform no longer existed. Now that armed insurrection was forever a relic of a simpler time, Gorz argued that the only route to socialism was by pushing reform that couldn’t be usurped by capital. Like many in his generation, Gorz saw the development of a postwar middle class and concluded that class struggle would forever be muted in the imperialist countries. The logical basis for this assumption can only be one thing: by entering the middle class and becoming propertied homeowners (among other things) first-world workers transitioned into a social category where revolution was no longer in their interests. As the onslaught of austerity and neoliberalism has proven, class struggle is not mutable, and to proclaim so is the gravest abandonment of the historical materialist methodology. Today, the  question of reform vs. revolution is just as relevant as when Rosa Luxemburg wrote:

Legislative reform and revolution are not different methods of historic development that can be picked out at the pleasure from the counter of history, just as one chooses hot or cold sausages. Legislative reform and revolution are different factors in the development of class society. They condition and complement each other, and are at the same time reciprocally exclusive, as are the north and south poles, the bourgeoisie and proletariat.6

Truly “non-reformist reforms”, like those in the SPA platform of 1912, do not discount the possibility of a class social revolution, they depend on it. The current use of the term repeats all the same mistakes of Bernstein’s evolutionary socialism that Rosa Luxemburg famously polemicized.

The major “non-reformist reforms” today seems to be shaped around a few key maxims, not dissimilar to some of the demands from the earlier German and American socialists: “tuition-free public universities”, “Medicare-for all”, and more recently, “abolish ICE”. But how did these demands develop? They were not produced organically by working-class institutions. They were touted by individuals claiming to be democratic socialists, running on the Democratic Party ballot line. First by Bernie Sanders, next through Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Immediately they were taken up by Jacobin and the DSA.

Could socialists temporarily use the Democratic ballot line, where third party campaigns are untenable until the mass base for an independent socialist party is built? Perhaps, though this is a debate for another time. But should this really be how socialist demands are developed? Instead of echoing demands scribed by politicians, they should be echoing our demands. And our demands should be in service to the ascension of the proletariat as a politically independent class actor, and towards a rupture with the capitalist nature of the state.

The most prominent socialist group in the US, Democratic Socialists of America, lacks any real political program. Its chapters are too federated, and the biennial national conventions are not frequent nor far-reaching enough for it to be a force for class struggle on a wide scale. How can there be “non-reformist reforms” without a class organization with unified goals pushing them? Instead of allowing independent politicians with support from socialists to steer the conversation with demands like  “abolish ICE”, we should be giving our demands to them. The Immigrant Justice Working Group of the Central New Jersey DSA provides for us a good example of what 21st century socialist demands look like:

  • An immediate end to all detentions and deportations, and dismissal of all related charges.
  • Abolition of ICE and all other military or quasi-military border forces.
  • Unconditional right to asylum to be granted upon request to anyone coming from a country that has been negatively impacted by US military or economic policies, or the policies of US corporations.
  • Citizenship and full rights (such as access to entitlement programs) upon request to anyone who has lived or worked in the US for at least six months.

The modern United States is not the Prussian state of 130 years ago, nor are its socialists facing the same conditions they faced in 1912. Demands that socialists make must reflect the realities of contemporary capitalism and its world system: nobody wants to merely recreate the old SPD or SPA. Still, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Socialists should be making demands that go beyond reverting to Bush-era normalcy: they should be pushing demands that the bourgeois parties tell us are impossible, and a political program is the only way to do so. These demands should aim to build class power both in the economic and political spheres. If DSA chapters started internally adopting programs with a little vision, they could eventually map one onto the national organization. DSA needs to become part of an organization with real class power independent of the Democrats, and it will never do that without first adopting formal demands at the national level that differentiates itself as a party divested from the interests of the capitalist class. Without a political program, we have no way of seriously posing an alternative to the established parties of capital, and articulating a vision of society for the democratic class rule of workers.